by
Maria S. Kardaun

July 11, 2013

Beowulf, the Geatish hero who prominently features in the famous Anglo-Saxon poem of the same name, is one of the most successful and radical monster-slayers that world mythology has to offer. However, as he grows older, the hero’s powers diminish and the poem ends with a sense of deep mourning and loss. With the help of comparative mythology I will try to shed some light on the nature of the successive forms of evil that Beowulf encounters. Secondly, I will contrast evil as it appears in the thousand year old epic poem Beowulf with some (post)modern ideas about evil that we find in Sturla Gunnarsson’s 2005 movie Beowulf and Grendel.

article

Beowulf
and Archetypal Evil

Maria S. Kardaun

Maastricht University, Faculty of
Arts and Social Sciences, Department of Literature

m.kardaun@maastrichtuniversity.nl

I – The
Storyline of the Old-English Poem Beowulf

In the year 1815, the Icelandic-Danish scholar
Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin, National Archivist of Denmark and
Professor of Antiquities at the University of Copenhagen, published
the first modern edition of a lengthy Old-English epic poem by the
name of Beowulf. The poem is important in many ways. For one
thing, its 3,182 lines of verse are a major source of our knowledge
of Old-English. Moreover, Beowulf is the only more or less
pagan Old-English epic to have survived the course of time. That is
to say, except for a few standard remarks about Christian faith,
which are not very relevant to the storyline, the poem is completely
pagan in nature. Thus, it offers us a glimpse into the lost world of
Anglo-Saxon mythology.

Although it is hard to tell exactly when Beowulf
was created, and by whom, without a doubt the poem is very old. The
only surviving manuscript, the so-called Nowell-codex, roughly dates
from around the year 1000. The codex is clearly a copy of an already
existent, earlier text and appears to have been written down by two
different scribes (from line 1939 onwards the handwriting is less
elegant and the spelling less unified; also the second half of the
poem shows more archaic and dialectical characteristics than the
first half, perhaps because the second scribe was more
straightforwardly copying the original, without trying to improve on
it).

Oral versions may date back
even further, possibly to the eighth or seventh century of the common
era. The few confirmed historical events that we find in Beowulf
–
for example a raid by the Geats against the Franks and the Frisians
that is also described by Gregory of Tours –
all seem to have taken place in or before the sixth century CE.
Furthermore, recent excavations at Lejre, Denmark’s
ancient royal seat, show the remnants of a mighty, well-situated, 47
metres long, Late Iron Age residence, that for several reasons is
believed to be possibly identical with king Hroðgar’s
famous mead hall Heorot (Niles & Osborn 2007, pp. 116-124 and
214-227). This residence was built in the middle of the sixth century
and abandoned by the mid-seventh century. It seems reasonable to
assume that the first versions of the oral tale that incorporated
these elements –
assuming there were oral versions to begin with –
started to take shape not so very much later in time.

Unlike comparable works,
such as the Odyssey
or the Arthurian legends, Beowulf
is not well-known to the general public. In fact, in the centuries
between 1000 and 1800 CE it had virtually disappeared from collective
memory, and after its rediscovery, some two centuries ago, it was
almost exclusively studied by academics and hardly read for pleasure.
The tale can therefore not be called a living
myth. Admittedly, readers may be acquainted with Beowulf
in an indirect way, namely through the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, who
borrowed much from Beowulf (including names, various sub-plots
and also the general atmosphere). Even so, there has not been any
continuity in the poem’s reception. The main reason for Beowulf’s
obscurity throughout most of the last millennium may be that the
Norman rulers who ruthlessly subjugated the Anglo-Saxon world in the
decades following the Battle of Hastings, tended to suppress
Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage in favour of ‘harmless’ older
legends about Celtic heroes, such as King Arthur.

Another thing to be noted is
that we have no
more than just a
single codex of the text at our disposal.
Furthermore, this one codex is our only
source of the tale’s main mythical subject matter. This means that
there is no such thing as a rich hoard of slightly different accounts
of Beowulf
that we could derive amplifications from. It
goes without saying that this uniqueness (possibly due to the
aforementioned Norman pacification policy) is
rather disappointing from a depth-psychological point of view. On
the other hand, in the text of Beowulf
there are several references to other, more widespread Northern
mythical stories, themes and figures, such as Weland the smith and
Sigemund and the dragon, and there can be no
doubt that Beowulf
is firmly rooted in the overall Germanic tribal civilization of the
early Middle Ages.

Before discussing the different
types of evil in Beowulf,
I will briefly summarize the storyline. To be sure, far from being a
mere chronicle, Beowulf
is a carefully composed, densely structured work of art, with many
inserted sub-stories, foreshadowing remarks and intriguing
flashbacks, but for our purposes it is best to rearrange the most
conspicuous events into a linear overview. Thus we may gain a clear
grasp of the basic mythological pattern underlying the tale.

Beowulf, the protagonist of the poem, is a
Geatland prince. He hails from an area that nowadays is situated in
Sweden. Not only is he a close relative of the king of the Geats, but
he is also a personal acquaintance of the king of the Danes, Hroðgar,
who lives in Sjoelland, Denmark. King Hroðgar was once generous to
Beowulf’s father and so Beowulf is indebted to him.

However, the poem does not
begin with the adventures of either Beowulf or Hroðgar, but at a
much earlier point in history, namely with the description of the
funeral of king Scyld Scefing, the mythical founding father of the
Danish royal dynasty and the supposed great-grandfather of king
Hroðgar. The first sixty odd lines of
verse commemorate the noble character and deeds of old king Scyld and
his successors, and it is only after this introduction that the story
turns to Hroðgar’s reign.

Hroðgar conceives of building
a huge and splendid mead hall, a hall that he
intends to be “a wonder of the world
forever” (line 70, in the translation of Seamus Heaney).
He names the hall Heorot
(meaning ‘stag’ or ‘hart’, which I will return to later). The
newly built, magnificent hall is a source of pride and joy to the
Danes who are thrilled by the feasts that Hroðgar organizes and the
royal gifts that he doles out. There is merriness, wealth and
generosity, and there are lively gatherings with music, elevated
poetry and huge amounts of beer.

But not for long, because a gruesome monster by
the name of Grendel, a child of darkness that lives in a ghastly
swamp, is unpleasantly disturbed by the sound of human happiness and
culture and starts paying nightly visits to Heorot. He develops the
habit of feeding himself with as many sleeping Danish warriors as he
possibly can. He continues to do so for twelve years: king Hroðgar
reigns during the day, but it is the monster that reigns at night.

Upon hearing about Hroðgar’s
misfortune, Beowulf and fourteen other Geatish warriors leave
Geatland and sail to Denmark, to offer their allegiance against this
terrible foe. Hroðgar is strengthened by the arrival of the Geats.
He organizes a party and they all stay at Heorot for the night. As
was to be expected, it does not take long before Grendel shows up.
His vicious heart laughs at the prospect of an exceptionally rich
meal. He seizes one of the sleeping men, rips him apart and devours
him completely, including feet and hands. Beowulf, however, is not
asleep. (The text puts some emphasis on the fact that he is the only
human being that is awake: lines 705f. and 1268). When Grendel
comes after him, Beowulf grabs him with all
his might and refuses to let go. A fierce battle ensues.
The other Geatish warriors try to assist Beowulf, but their weapons
are of no use, because not even the best iron in the world can harm
this most evil of creatures. Finally, after a terrible duel, without
armour or sword, Beowulf manages to tear off the arm of the beast.
Grendel is defeated. He flees and returns to his muddy home to die,
his hideous arm
nailed to the wall of Heorot as a trophy.

Now everyone is very much
relieved. Beowulf is rewarded with great honour
and noble gifts. Heorot is cleaned up, Hroðgar resumes his royal
lifestyle and life at court returns to business as usual,
which, among
other things,
means that they all get drunk.

However, that night the Danes
are in for a rather unpleasant surprise: as it turns out, the monster
has a mother. (Apparently Grendel and his mother form a kind of
couple; they dwell in the same filthy swamp and the text never
mentions any other living relatives of Grendel. Furthermore, as
Hroðgar explains in lines 1355-7,
the monster and its mother have been seen together,
but nobody knows anything about
a father.) While
the Danes sleep,
unaware of any danger, the mother suddenly
shows up at the mead hall to avenge the death of her son. In a kind
of hit-and-run action she snatches one of the Danish warriors, namely
Hroðgar’s favourite knight Aeschere, and kills him. She also
retrieves her son’s arm.

Beowulf was
sleeping elsewhere at the time, and it is
only the next morning that he finds out about this second vile
creature. Devastated, Hroðgar puts all his hope in
Beowulf again. He implores the young hero to help him once more and
also kill Grendel’s mother for him. Though Beowulf does not feel
too confident he accepts the unexpected extra challenge and descends
into the swampy pit where the Grendel family have their home.

Within the swamp there is an underwater den
containing both Grendel’s corpse and his
doting mother. Beowulf and the monster’s mother
fight a fierce battle. Beowulf is armed this time, but his human
sword is worthless against the demonic
enemy. He is
nearly killed,
but just in time he catches sight of another weapon, a magical sword
from a long bygone age, forged by giants. It has a wavy-patterned
blade – hence is very sharp – and is “larger than any other man
might carry out to battle-play” (line 1560, translation by Michael
Swanton). Beowulf grabs the otherworldly, damascened, super-sized
sword and decapitates Grendel’s mother. He also cuts off the head
of Grendel’s corpse, and after that he swims ashore where he is
anxiously awaited by his men. He has the giant sword with him,
however the blade has melted owing to the foul blood of the
two monsters. Upon his return to Heorot, Beowulf
again receives many royal gifts, as well as a very grateful speech by
Hroðgar, though with a mild warning this time: Beowulf should not
think that his luck will last forever. Finally the hero returns to
Geatland.

Back in Geatland, at the court
of his uncle, king Hygelac, Beowulf recounts what happened on his
journey to the Danes, and so we get to hear the main events again,
but now from the hero’s own perspective. The next thing we read, is
that Beowulf follows his uncle in an oversea raid against the Franks.
On this expedition, Hygelac is killed and Beowulf swims home in full
armour. Thereupon, his aunt, queen Hygd, offers Beowulf the throne of
Geatland, but Beowulf declines in favour
of Hygelac and Hygd’s young son Heardred. However, somewhat later
prince Heardred is killed by the Swedes, and so the
brave and loyal Beowulf is proclaimed king
of the Geats after all.

Thereupon
Beowulf rules the Geats for a very long time, fifty years to be
precise, and he is in all respects a great king: wise as a ruler and
a trustworthy guardian of his native land. However, at the end of his
life disaster strikes again, meaning that in his old age Beowulf has
to deal with a frightening supernatural foe once more. This time his
adversary is not a troll from the swamps but a fiery dragon. Someone
had stolen a cup from its hoard, and now the sinister creature is
infuriated and has started burning down all of Beowulf’s empire.1

Though Beowulf is now of quite
an advanced age,
he is still as brave as ever, and together with twelve of his
knights, he attempts to pursue the dragon into its lair. However, as
soon as the mission starts to become really dangerous, the knights do
not dare to follow him. Only his young Swedish relative Wiglaf stays
with him until
the end. Against the scorching enemy Beowulf’s sword is of no use,
but his iron shield offers him some protection. Beowulf wishes he
could have approached the dragon without artificial means, as in the
fight with Grendel long ago, but realizes that this is impossible.
Finally, Beowulf manages to slay the dragon with the help of young
Wiglaf, but he is mortally wounded by the dragon’s poison. He dies
in the hope that at least the dragon’s gold will benefit his
people, the Geats. However, as the reader finds out after Beowulf has
died, the gold is in fact enchanted and has to be buried. The poem
then ends as it began, with a funeral and with a sad yet grateful
commemoration of a truly great king.

II – The
Storyline of the Movie Beowulf
and Grendel

Let
us now turn to the storyline of Sturla Gunnarsson’s 2005
film production Beowulf & Grendel.
Here the events are presented as more or less realistic, the setting
is historical, and there are definitely no magical elements. In fact,
the film-makers
appear to have done their utmost to demythologize and disenchant the
old mythical tale of Beowulf and have turned it into an explicit
psychological lesson.

And
what an explicit lesson it is. The makers seem to be afraid that we
might miss the point and so they spell everything out for us. For
example, apart from simply showing us what happens, they come up with
short, informative texts, such as “A Hate Is Born” or “From the Sea a Hero”,
or they inform us about exactly where and in what historical year a
particular event is supposed to take place.

Moreover,
in order to enhance our understanding of what happens in the plot – the
plot being: Danish king builds magnificent hall which a monster
subsequently attempts to destroy, followed by the appearance of a
saviour-hero from overseas who manages to solve the problem – they explain to us
in detail what in their view must have happened before. In other
words, we learn that there is a history behind the monster’s
mysterious aggression. For example, we learn that in the year 500 AD,
that is to say some twenty years before the main events take place, the
young king Hroðgar, without having been provoked in any way, killed
the father of Grendel right in front of the latter’s eyes. At that
time, Grendel was only a helpless child. The Grendels are depicted in
the film as a kind of Neanderthal people, as primitive but innocent
outsiders who are despised by the Danes, who consider themselves superior. In short, we are to understand that poor Grendel
has every reason to hate king Hroðgar and his arrogant Danish
warriors, and that Grendel’s wish to devastate Heorot some twenty
years later makes perfect sense.

And
of course there is a romantic interest in the movie. Grendel has a
mate that he cares about, a witch (who is no more to be found in the
original epic poem Beowulf than Grendel’s father). The witch is both a very beautiful and a
particularly articulate woman. As Grendel’s partner and the mother
of his son, she is living proof of Grendel’s high esteem of
traditional family values, but she also serves to clarify the
monster’s point of view to the audience.
Beowulf feels attracted to her and visits her often.
What we find out through her is that, though society projects ‘the
Other’ onto
Grendel, the poor guy actually
means
well. In other words, it
is not
Grendel who is
the cause of evil, but society’s rather hysterical projections.
Grendel is a kind of noble savage, with a natural sense of right and
wrong. He is always very precise and proportionate in his justified
revenge on the world, and has never harmed anyone innocent at all.
Actually, it is not Grendel but we
who need
to be re-educated.

Another
point where the film significantly differs from the Old-English
original is in
its view of Christianity.
The
Old-English poem as we have it – that is to say, the version that
has come to us through the Nowell-codex – was clearly edited in
Christian times. Especially in the first half of the poem we find
references to God, not only by the narrator but also by Beowulf
himself and in a quite natural way for that matter. Still, Christian
views are hardly integrated into the events, and it is the mythical
heroism in Beowulf that constitutes the plot. For example, though
the
narrator remarks that the “holy God, [...] the mighty Lord, Ruler
of skies” (lines 1553f., translation by Howell Chickering) helped
Beowulf to survive an otherwise deadly attack, there is no
explanation as to how and why this happens and the real solution of
Beowulf’s problem subsequently comes from a magical sword.2

In the film this is all very different.
Christianity is an issue here. Several of the uncouth Danes are won
over to the idea of having themselves baptized by an Irish priest.
The idea seems to be that Christianity is somehow less brutal than
paganism, and it is suggested that their increasing readiness to be
baptized is a sign that at least some of the Danes have begun to see
the necessity of becoming slightly more civilized.

At
the same time, the real hero of the film, Beowulf, has already moved
beyond (superficial forms of) Christianity. His ideals are quite
similar to the ideals of a perfectly modern, secular type of
post-Christian humanism. All the same, the filmmakers chose to
fashion their
hero iconographically after conventional nineteenth and
twentieth-century Western representations of Jesus Christ. Especially
in the second half of the film the cinematic Beowulf – a tall,
dark-blond young man in plain white clothes with a mild expression on
his bearded face – could easily be mistaken for the protagonist of
a run-of-the-mill gospel movie.

The
dénouement, finally, is as follows: just as in the mythical story,
Beowulf eliminates both Grendel and Grendel’s mother for king
Hroðgar. However, in marked contrast to the original the Grendels in
the movie are in fact quite honourable and the hero cannot help
finding out about the structural injustice that is done to these
supposedly evil creatures. Beowulf gradually starts to unravel
Hroðgar’s part in the problem and after a while it becomes clear
to him, that for Hroðgar to get rid of his depression and alcohol
problem, he needs to clear his conscience and confess. At first
Hroðgar is reluctant to do so –
it takes several
therapeutic sessions before he admits his guilt –,
but once he has done so, he starts to feel better. Thereupon, Beowulf
brings peace, reconciliation and forgiveness to all the participants
in the drama, not only to the king of the Danes, but also to the
witch and to Grendel’s son. Beowulf sleeps with the witch, tells
the son he should be proud of his father and posthumously even
honours Grendel himself by giving him a dignified burial, thereby
ending the cycle of violence that Hroðgar started.

And
that is apparently all there is to it. The movie does not bother to
tell us what happens in the much darker second half of the original
story, where Beowulf and his people meet their doom. Ultimately, the
movie is not distressing at all. Beowulf goes back to Geatland, his
mission accomplished. All’s well that ends well, and in
all probability they all live happily ever after.

III
– Two Contrasting
Approaches to Evil

This brings us to my final topic. Where does evil
come from? For example, in the context of the Beowulf-tale it is
quite natural to ask ourselves: why is it that Grendel terrorizes
Heorot? Let us explore two different answers, the first a civilized,
enlightened, Judaeo-Platonic-Christian-Humanistic-(post)modern,
relatively pleasant one, the second a primitive, mythological, yet to
my mind much more realistic one.

The civilized answer is rather straightforwardly
presented in the film. Though evil may be scary, there is a remedy,
it can be redeemed. If only we can bring ourselves to be nice to
supposed monsters, if we make the effort and come to understand their
point of view, we are likely to discover they mean no harm, because
they may well be simply wonderful people. The message of the film is
a good news message of the cheerful kind that is to be found in the
gospels: evil does not have to exist, you can make it go away. In the
end evil is just a matter of misunderstanding, social injustice and
projection; as soon as we manage to see through these mechanisms,
evil will disappear and paradise begin. Hallelujah.

The
mythical story is richer and far more ominous. First of all, the
original Beowulf
is cyclical in structure.3
It starts and ends with the obsequies for a deceased hero-king, king
Scyld and king Beowulf respectively. In both cases there is joy over
the glorious deeds that have been done, but sorrow because all this
has now come to an end. Apart from being sad about Beowulf’s death,
the Geats also realize that the loss of their protector may get them
involved in an involuntary war. In other words, the original story
does not exactly have a happy ending. Besides, in the many
sub-stories that the poem contains, we also read about other kings
and heroes, and not only about their successes, but first and
foremost about how they all meet their fate. As James Campbell
observes: “All the kings and kingdoms mentioned in the poem
ultimately come to grief, and the poet is at pains to remind his
audience of this. The world he describes is an unstable one”
(Campbell 1991 [1982], p. 54.). Indeed it is, but is our own world
that different? Is not our own world unstable as well? Isn’t the
human condition fundamentally unstable?

A feeling that is very typical of mythology, but
unlike anything that we in our contemporary Western world view tend
to believe, is that the mere fact of human achievement is enough to
provoke evil. Naturally, in the pictorial language of mythology, when
evil is summoned it appears mostly in the form of angry or jealous
gods, goddesses, demons or other supernatural beings, such as the
Grendel figure. In psychological terms we might say that any
conscious effort to do something particularly well is bound to have
its downside. Conscious decisions tend to disturb the balance in the
psyche and may therefore elicit uncalled-for reactions from the
unconscious. Especially if one tries very hard to accomplish
something these unconscious reactions may be rather nasty and can
actually spoil the party.

From
a modern point of view there is absolutely nothing wrong with king
Hroðgar. Quite the contrary, he is brave and generous and thoroughly
civilized. He has the best of intentions, treats everyone with
respect and is clearly full of wisdom. Not for nothing does the text
call him “blameless in everything” (line 1885, translation by
Howell Chickering). You feel for him when you read what calamities
happen to him for twelve long years, because he really does not
deserve it. He is a more than decent chap, really the most civilized
person one can imagine.

However,
according to the logic of Beowulf,
that may well be Hroðgar’s problem. He is too
decent, something which is simply impossible within more modern
Western value systems. King Hroðgar is over-civilized (not only he
himself, naturally, but him and his court; for in mythical thinking
the king is supposed to embody the community as a whole). As I see
it, the Danes have a Jekyll and Hyde-problem. As you may remember
from Stevenson’s
famous novella, Jekyll was
also
too civilized, which
explains why
perfect Dr. Jekyll could not resist turning into despicable Mr. Hyde
every now and then (see Barbara Hannah’s
short monograph Ego
and Shadow, Hannah
1963). Civilization involves
repression, and repression entails tension as well as a number of
rejected, uncontrolled, primitive forces that want to get out. A
small amount of tension may perhaps not cause problems, but a sudden
leap in civilization certainly entails huge tension, and possibly
dissociation.

The
latter is what seems to have happened to Hroðgar and the Danes.
Psychologically speaking, the situation depicted in the first half of
Beowulf
is an image of dissociation: during the day king Hroðgar is in
charge, he is benevolent, well-mannered, generous etc., but at night
the Danish king has to give the floor to a man-eating
monster.
And this uncanny situation has come into being right after good king
Hroðgar built himself a new center of power that he called ‘Heorot’,
meaning ‘hart’.

A
hart is a male red deer of at least five years of age, that is to say
the deer in its fully mature state. In the Middle Ages, it was seen
as the most difficult and therefore most prestigious hunting prey, a
noble creature, a match only for kings. It is not for nothing that
the hart is a well-known symbol in heraldry. In other words, ‘Heorot’
is a very proud and majestic name, something which in a mythical
context immediately hints at the idea that the name-giver might be
suffering from hybris.

Hroðgar is very high-minded and aims at control
and perfection. He has become king – as was common practice in
Germanic tribal culture – because of his victories in war (lines
64-67). But he does not only want to be a warlord, but also wants to
be known as a man of cultural prestige, and so he has built himself a
glorious mead hall that is intended to surpass all others in the
world. He has even given it a golden roof (lines 926-927). And that
is not all. Also on a moral level, Hroðgar is determined to shine.
With Heorot as his royal seat he will rule as a truly great lord, for
example he will share all his possessions with his people (lines
71-72).

And
indeed, as soon as Heorot is ready, Hroðgar starts living as he
intended to, and everything would be just perfect, were he not struck
by disaster in the form of the monstrous Grendel who is annoyed by
the sound of human thriving. So, the result of all Hroðgar’s
efforts is that his idealistic
values apply during the day, that is to say in the realm of the
conscious mind. However, unfortunately, during the night, that is to
say behind his back, without his knowledge, his unrealistic views are
compensated by their very unpleasant, merciless and brutal reverse.

This
is the situation that poor Hroðgar and the Danes find themselves in
for twelve years. And they cannot solve their problem on their own,
because ‘Grendel’ concerns their own blind spots. The monster
from the chilly swamp is incomprehensible to them and beyond their
reach, because he is the reverse side of their own civilized
standards. If they are to get rid of the Grendel-problem at all, they
need someone who is to a certain extent akin to Grendel.

Luckily
for them there is Beowulf. He is the perfect match for Grendel:
Grendel devours thirty men in just one night (line 123 and lines
1581f.), but Beowulf has the strength of thirty men (line 379f.) and
in the raiding expedition against the Franks and the Frisians,
Beowulf carries away the war-gear of thirty enemies (line 2361f.).
There are more similarities: unlike the Danes, both Grendel and
Beowulf are relatively close to nature. As I see it, Grendel
symbolizes the rejected, natural, animal-like parts of the psyche,
conjured up by the Danes’ sudden leap in civilization. His heroic
counterpart Beowulf possesses some of these animal characteristics as
well. The name ‘Beowulf’ may be understood as a kenning
for ‘bear’ (namely ‘Bee-wolf’, Chickering 2006, p. 252) or
then again it may mean ‘War-wolf’ (Bosworth
& Toller 1898, p. 87).
In any case, our hero is named after a wild and ferocious animal.
Furthermore, Beowulf, like Grendel, tends to fight bare-handed,
without weapons (or in any case when
he fights without artificial means, as he does in his confrontation
with Grendel, he is at his best). Just like Harry Potter and so many
other heroes in literature and mythology, Beowulf rather resembles
the enemy he fights.

As
it happens, Beowulf is also the only other creature besides Grendel
who is awake during Grendel’s nocturnal visits to Heorot. This is
explicitly said several times in the text. One wonders how the Danes
can always be sleeping while waiting for the monster to appear!
Astonishingly, also the Geatish warriors, though they have come to
Heorot with the special purpose of helping the Danes against their
devilish foe, are sound asleep when Grendel visits them, and that is
why Grendel can grab a comrade of Beowulf and eat him. These
naive collective sleep-ins at Heorot, when taken literally, are so
utterly absurd that they can only be understood on a symbolic level,
namely as a sign that except for Beowulf everybody else is completely
unconscious of this particular type of evil. Beowulf is alert where
others are not. He does not shut his eyes where others are asleep. He
is the only one ready to confront evil.

After Grendel’s elimination, the Danes believe that evil has been
eradicated, but it is not, because Grendel’s mother appears. She is
really the nastiest mother-complex one can imagine. In my view, she
embodies an ultra-conservative, hostile tendency towards stagnation
and regression. Just when the Danes think they can return to their
former lifestyle again, she paralyzes them by dragging Hroðgar’s
favorite warrior, so to say his right hand, as well as her son’s
claw to her swamp. She seems perhaps less violent than her son, who
in his heyday used to kill many Danes in a single raid, but she may
well be more tricky than him. In any case she strikes with more
precision, and as it turns out, she is also more difficult to
eliminate. Still, Beowulf manages to deal with this deeper problem
too, by confronting her in the underwater
den
and beheading her. He also beheads Grendel’s corpse. He literally
dives into the world of the Grendel family and cuts off the way of
thinking that they represent.

In the second part of the poem, Beowulf is
depicted as a peaceful, fair and wise king who has ruled for fifty
years, and now the time has come for him to leave the stage. The film
leaves out this part of the story, but it is important to notice that
in the original poem there is no such thing as a final redemption.
Anything (or anyone) that rules is bound to become rigid, outdated
and in need of replacement some day. For those whose time has come it
is of course a narcissistic blow to have to make place, but it cannot
be helped. Even the most ideal of situations cannot stay the way it
is forever. At some point someone has to spice up things a little
bit, and in Beowulf’s case the spice is provided by a fire dragon.
Beowulf was capable of dealing with the cold frenzy that overcame the
Danes as the reverse of their sudden over-sophistication, but in the
figure of the blistering dragon Beowulf finally meets his fate.

The poem then ends as it began, with solemn death
rites for, and praise of, a truly great king. Its cyclical structure
expresses that in the Anglo-Saxon world there is no sense of linear
progression but only of temporary victories that are always followed
by defeat. According to the mythical world view, that is what the
human condition is. And we should not be too sorry, because, like the
good king Scyld, Beowulf too has been a more than respectable king.
The same expression is used for both of them: “þæt wæs god
cyning” (lines 11 and 2390). Perfection does not exist, except as
an illusion in the human mind. Being good and being able to maintain
oneself – like Beowulf – for a long period of time is already an
admirable achievement and a reason for joy. It is more than one can
normally expect from life. It is great.4

1Indeed,
this is one of the many elements in Beowulf
that return in Tolkien’s oeuvre. In 1938, in a letter to the
editor of the Observer
(Carpenter 1981, letter 25), Tolkien explains this matter as
follows: “Beowulf
is among my most valued sources; though it was not consciously
present to the mind in the process of writing, in which the episode
of the theft arose naturally (and almost inevitably) from the
circumstances. It is difficult to think of any other way of
conducting the story at that point. I fancy the author of Beowulf
would say much the same.”

2Unfortunately
I cannot agree with Alan Ambrisco, who claims that the original poem
shares with Gunnarsson’s movie “a hard look at pagan culture,
its violence and its code of vengeance, its rhetoric of heroism and
the compromises it requires of human beings in pursuit of fame”
(Ambrisco 2013, p. 252). In the poem there is not much of an
opposition between Christian and pagan values. As Michael Alexander
rightly observes: “The poem presents its world as a kind of
ancestral Old Testament, a heroic age under former dispensation,
where wonders are to be expected.” (Alexander 2005, p. xvii)

3As
Susan Hathaway Boydston suggests in her Freudian interpretation of
Beowulf,
the loose, episodic structure of the poem with its many digressions
and lack of progression may be understood in the light of its
preoedipal content (Boydston 2005, 156f.). Indeed, there may be a
fruitful theme for further investigation here, as many mythical
works (if not all) are cyclical and episodic, whereas modern
literary works and movies usually are not: they tend to tell a(n
oedipal) story with a head and a tail.